Celebrate your child's love of learning

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Dad on a Lark

One morning last week I took Larkin around the corner to a public meeting concerning three curbside trees the city wanted to take down. People listened to a city engineer explain that the trees were causing a problem. The sidewalk was buckling, its plates of gray slate pushed up by roots. A maximum 1 inch gap was allowed between those sidewalk sections, he said.

When it was our turn, some kids from the grade school read poems ("A tree is something I know," began one), and neighbors stood atop the buckled sidewalk and proclaimed the value of living in an irregular world. We must have been persuasive, because three days later we got word the trees would stay.

This is a tree-hugging kind of neighborhood, its 100-year-old houses ensconced in an urban forest of evergreens, oaks, and maples, even a sycamore or two. Molly and I have been considering moving (our city street is a busy thoroughfare, cars go way too fast), but so far we've decided that we love our spacious, tree-filled backyard way too much to leave. We have a back balcony porch, up on the second floor, where we eat dinner in summer. We call it our tree fort, and the view from up there reminds me of Japanese painting, with its bird's-eye-view perspectives and floating depths.

Life is majestic and serene up in the treetops. Larkin likes to peek over the top of the balcony railing, pointing at birds and squirrels. To our north, a mammoth oak straddles the fence between our yard and the Tangarones, who've lived here fifty years. To the south, a second oak graces the Gales' lawn, where John Gale has recently parked a 1941 Oldsmobile that his grandfather bought new and gave him twenty-five years later.

These neighborly histories remind me that the marvel of trees isn't just about beauty, but time. I love the way trees reach so far up — and so far back.

My mother, who died of lung cancer last year, loved trees. Our family's house had a variety of them in the yard. Pink and white dogwood, five colossal Norway maples, a mulberry tree whose fallen berries my sister and I would stomp in, staining our feet purple. And a strange hybrid tree, grafted together of beech and maple. The graft created a natural saddle, and one of my early memories is of being 3 years old, and my parents helping me climb up into it.

Trees fascinate children. I remember the midnight walks my mother took us on — she'd wake us one night each summer, unannounced — and how the trees looked from below, against a night sky, the leaves like hands blocking out stars. My bedroom window looked out on a maple that was partly cut away around a streetlight, and when a storm approached, the tree grew restless, then frantic, its branches flailing against the streetlight and splashing a vivid shadow theater on my wall.

I hope Larkin will love trees the way I do. Already she exclaims over the scene in Go, Dog, Go! where the dogs park their cars and climb "Up the tree! Up the tree!" for "a big dog party!" And when we go outside in the morning and pass under the oak, I ask her, "Where's the big tree?," and she thrusts her finger skyward and cranes her neck to look.

It's one of those rituals I do as much for myself as for her. (OK, maybe more.) But I want to get her hooked on trees early. I look forward to building a tree fort for her when she's a little older. And to taking her on midnight walks under the branches — a tradition that will link her to my mother and help bridge a gulf of mortality and time. "My mom used to do this with me," I can hear myself saying, "when I was your age."

There are ways to help children take in the mystery of time. When you have a family pet, the process of youth, aging, and death plays out within the compass of a decade in your child's life, imparting poignant lessons about the life cycle. Trees do the opposite, placing our lives within their compass, teaching the child — and reminding the adult — of life cycles longer than our own. When we place ourselves next to a tree, literally and figuratively, we know that we, too, will someday disappear.

Trees are especially important in a city, a connection to the natural world that I want Larkin to have. But my tree thing is more personal than that. I had a happy childhood, and I associate trees with that happiness. And, somehow, with my mother. Maybe it's just the nature of trees: their way of standing squarely rooted in a child's world, but with a view far beyond it; their beauty; their sheltering dependability. After my mother died I had this recurring dream. I'd be somewhere in my old hometown, and everything looked as it did when I was a small child — all the old buildings, seen from a vantage point low to the ground, not 6 foot 2, but 3 foot 2. Throughout the dream, I was aware of this presence — tall — right next to me. I could never see her, but I knew she was there. That comforting, sheltering shadow.

I remember the last time I was ever outdoors with my mother. It was a week before she died, and I visited her at the nursing home she was in, Beechwood. The place is named for a pair enormous copper beech trees on its front lawn. I wheeled her out in her wheelchair and we sat out under one of those trees — a sunny, unusually breezy day in early July. She asked me to turn off her oxygen, and she sat back and closed her eyes and breathed slowly, in and out. After a while she opened her eyes and her gaze traveled up and lingered among the branches and the rustling, deep crimson leaves.

"It's beautiful," she whispered. "It's just beautiful."

P.S.
Starting September 6, my blog will also be available on Family.com, a new sister site to Wondertime.com. You can create your own profile page there, upload a photo, and leave comments. And I'll be able to join the conversation there, too, responding to your comments, something I've been eager to do. So ... see you soon at Family.com!